Lord of the Rings doesn't dwell on the day-to-day details of how the various kingdoms functioned, and yet it's still a great story.
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I disagree. It does not dwell on economy, or technology, but at least we have pretty good overview of social fabric and power structures: how kings get to power, how they make decisions, how they raise armies, how they deal with allies, etc.
Another thing: Bret Devereaux has some very detailed analysis on his blog ([1],[2]) of various LOTR battles/war campaings and it seems that Tolkien was meticulous about getting details of the warfare right, like how far and how fast can army move, what the commander can and cannot know at given time, and how medieval style battles are actually won/lost (including the impact of morale). Compare that with the mess that are two last seasons of Game of Thrones...
[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...
[2] https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helm...
The book and movie didn’t (and was better for it - The Annualized Return of The Kings Fields would be dry reading) but Tolkien clearly did (both in his notes and in his thoughts). If I want these people to live here and go to the bar here, where would they have to work, and what kind of work would it entail?
“Real world” stories don’t need to dwell on it much because you can just use history and real life - if you base a story in 50s Detroit it’s going to be much different than 2020s Detroit. And if you mess it up and claim 2020s Detroit is a bustling hub of automobile manufacturing it’s going to feel off.
But fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi, needs a lot of these details to be at least thought about. Then the references and glimpses will feel correct and real.
> The book [...] didn’t
You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :)
Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.
Assuming you are referring to The Council of Elrond, I think perhaps you're misremembering.
The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo.
All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the ring or foreshadow something later, like Moria has been reoccupied and there is something evil there.
So there really isn't any information given that doesn't bear on the story at all.
Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.
Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.
It's true that if you haven't read The Hobbit there are a few gaps (not least, exactly how Bilbo got the ring).
But Glóin actually appears in the previous chapter Many Meetings, where he is sat next to Frodo at the feast and introduces himself there.
Most people get tripped up in the descriptions of flora and landscapes or the poetry; The Council of Elrond is one of the easier parts and moves along quickly.
A book is different. Part of the appeal is that sort of attention to detail. It definitely filters people who can deal with it.
My dad was a literature nerd. He loved Tolstoy. Personally, I’d rather be tortured by the Czars secret police than suffer through that. :)
It didn't dwell on it, but Tolkien was incredibly meticulous about consistency, distances, travel times, how politics works in his universe, and logistics.
And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
... And then you get The Hobbit.
> And the films, for the most part, stuck very close to the source material.
Although when they depart, they swung for the fences. Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship), just to get cheap drama when characters act out of character under the influence of the Ring. It was really aggravating.
Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)
This is not the central theme of LOTR (the books). While forces like virtue and friendship are important, the central theme was you can survive even the worst evil if you retain your humanity. (Remember: LOTR was heavily influenced by Tolkiens' experience as a soldier in WWI.)
This best encapsulated by Sams' speech at the end of the second film:
"It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
> Multiple times Peter Jackson felt the need to throw out Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)
Is that the theme? The ring wasn't beaten by the power of virtue or friendship. It was beaten by itself.
It loses it at some key points to aid visual clarity (and I guess cut the CGI costs), like Minas Tirith being on a featureless plain rather than surrounded by farmland.
The Hobbit was more of a Disney theme park ride than a story.
There is an unofficial version of The Hobbit called the “m4 book edit” floating around that removes most of the extraneous junk. It’s vastly better than the theatrical versions.
If you want a good version of The Hobbit, you can just watch the Rankin-Bass version. It has good songs too.